


It Takes One to Hope

by Oblivian03



Series: Freedom is a Hard Road: Fëanor Lives AU [2]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Brotherly Angst, Post-Helcaraxë, Post-Rescue from Thangorodrim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-07-05
Packaged: 2020-06-09 22:53:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19485670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oblivian03/pseuds/Oblivian03
Summary: Tyelkormo will not give up on Maitimo, even if everyone else has. Nor will he let a little thing like politics and Kingly orders stop him from seeing his brother in his uncle's settlement.





	It Takes One to Hope

**Author's Note:**

> This expands on how Celegorm got into Maedhros' sick room in chapter 9 'Of Fire and Fools' - you don't need to have read the story previous to this, though I would recommend it. 
> 
> Quenya names are used here (though I use Sindarin in my notes). See a list of names at the end if you need it.

He was crouched in some bushes in the shadow of the wall watching carefully as the guards passed him with their haughty chins held high. Huan waited for him somewhere on the other side of the wall he had discreetly scaled, ever loyal. Tyelkormo clenched his fists. His heart was pounding. Would Huan come if he were found and captured? Undoubtedly.

(Would his father?)

The hunter was not blind. He knew that much hostility laid between the two Noldor settlements around Lake Mithrim. He knew how delicate the entire situation was. His brothers liked to claim him the densest among them, but Tyelkormo was no fool. Despite his hatred for politics and its tendency

to use fancy words to stagnant everything around it so that some overwrought Lord’s feelings would be appeased, Fëanáro’s son could appreciate when finesse was needed. When patience was required to ensure the quarry was not lost. He was a hunter after all.

Yet, hunters knew when action was needed too. More so than those politicians caught in their intangible worlds of compromise.

Tyelkormo pressed against the side of the building that shadowed him and glanced to the owl preening its feathers on a post. It was the same bird that he had previously saved from a mire and later implored it to aid him in giving news of his ailing brother. The owl had agreed, eager to repay his kindness, though had quickly been rebuffed by Ñolofinwë. Now it would guide him to where Maitimo was being kept.

If the elf was scared of what he might find there, he did not show it. Instead he crept forward to the shelter of another alcove and waited for the owl to take flight again. His lips were stretched thin in a determined line.

_Everyone else may have given up on you, brother, but I have not._

Something wet ran down his cheek. The owl called softly to the elf, its low hooting meant as a comfort. Tyelkormo took from it what he could. Held fast to its words from before, spoken in the tongue of the Wild: the stench of death was close but hung not upon Maitimo himself. There was still hope, as sure as the wind which waved the grass leaf and the bee’s keen sense of where was home. Even bears awoke from their slumber when the snowdrops unfurled their heads.

It was wild violas, not snowdrops, that were crushed beneath the elf’s feet. One plucked stem twirled between his fingers.

Curufinwë had chased after him in his grand storming from that room they had condemned Maitimo to an ending in once again. The smith was easily lost amidst the bustle of the day, doubly so when the brother he pursued knew how to tread lightly and unseen. Tyelkormo had deafened his ears to his brother’s cries, had taken his bow (left now with Huan alongside his sword, his knife enough for security) and taken leave of the settlement towards the other. There had been no doubt in his mind. No moment of epiphany or stark rebellion. Just the thought that Fëanáro was wrong – they all were wrong – and an urge to see his eldest sibling with his own eyes.

Did it make him a traitor, his disobedience? All those times he had sent owls to spy on that miserable room, all the times he had spoken to hunters from the other side, telling them where the best prey might be found in return for just a scrape of news? Did it make him a traitor now, defying orders to see his brother as his brother had defied orders in Losgar?

(He should have disobeyed long ago, that his brother might not have languished in the foul cesspit of Angamando for so long.

How many times had he ridden out and gone no further than the edge of the known land? Only once had he gone past and further North to stand at what seemed the tip of the shadow Thangorodrim cast over Beleriand. He had stood there until orcs came and, after dispatching those, had fled when the air itself darkened in a way reminiscent of the Darkening of the Trees.)

(Tyelkormo’s brothers called him dense sometimes. His own late grandfather had declared him unfit for the nuances of politics more than once. Yet, the elf could keep a secret better than any politically inclined fool he knew.)

The owl moved again and Tyelkormo followed cautiously, hiding every time another elf passed nearby. It was slow progress, but he had hunted deer at a slower pace. It helped that their old settlement had not changed much since Ñolofinwë’s followers had taken it over. How many times had he tread these shadowed paths to escape from his overbearing family? 

Perhaps it was right that Maitimo would wake – for he _would_ wake (he must) – in this place his family had called home for so long. The owl had described, in its report, a building that sounded much like the house Fëanáro and his sons had dwelt in when they resided here. Tyelkormo wondered if his eldest brother would wake to a room filled with its corners stained by Makalaurë’s ink, or the one with the dent from where Caranistir had struck the wall. Perhaps the same mould stain would greet him as it greeted the Ambarussa every morn they spent there. Or perhaps it would be his own restless carvings around the edges of the ceiling, in the corners where they would be easily overlooked that would grant Maitimo some semblance of comfort.

There were so many little markings in that house which conjured the echo of its last occupants. A forgotten button. A lost nail from a contraption that did not work. A knot of harp string caught between uneven window edges and a tuning key rolled beneath some warped board. Were there footprints still where Caranistir had stamped his feet in anger? The scorch marks from Telperinquar’s poor attempt at cooking while half in dreams. Scratches from door to door upon the floor would, if followed and traced with careful fingers, conjure the image of a large hound eagerly bounding from room to room. It would be like reading tracks and the tales they told of creatures long since past from where one knelt and looked. Tyelkormo could see himself, if he closed his eyes, tracing a long gash in one wall and nearly tasting the anger of his father, almost palpable after another failed attempt at laying siege to Angamando.

None of those echoes would speak of a tall, copper headed elf.

(His head had been shaven. The owl had told him that. The hunters too with a vague look of pity upon their weathered faces.)

The fair-haired elf ground his teeth against a wave of longing for a home he would never return to and pushed on, a little less careful now as memory made him rash. Perhaps it was this rashness that gave him away in the end, that made him death to the rustle of cloth over the lightest of footsteps as someone came upon him while his attention was fixed steadfastly on the owl.

“ _You_.”

Far from joy, the voice set Tyelkormo on edge, his hand surreptitiously moving to the knife at his side. The elf turned, his own chin held high. He would not be cowed by her. 

“Iríssë,” he said shortly.

“Traitor,” she spat in return.

Tyelkormo clenched his jaw. How could he be the traitor when it was her father who had sought to overthrow his own, after swearing fealty no less. He almost said as such. Yet, the hunter in him paused and his blood tingled with the need for patience.

“What are you doing here?” his once (still?) favourite cousin asked. One of her ears was shorter and rougher around the edges. Such were the marks the Grinding Ice had left, or so he had been told.

(One hunter had borne half the fingers he had left Valinor with. He had also borne tales of great bears and seals, and even whales, hunted with spears carved from bone.

Had Iríssë hunted such beasts?)

The freed thralls of Moringotto also bore marks and worse ones. Tyelkormo did not falter as he met Iríssë’s cold gaze. “I am here to see my brother whom your father holds in his keeping.”

“No such invitation has been extended to you,” she said.

He bristled. “I am within my rights to see him!”

“Not here, you are not,” came the reply.

“You would keep brother from brother, then?”

“As you tore kin from kin?”

The two paused, panting as they glared at each other, the White Lady and the third son of Fëanáro. The latter swept out a hand in anger.

“Nelyo deserves to be with family,” he said.

“He _is_ ,” Iríssë hissed back. “He will not pass alone and wretched as some might hope he does, but in comfort with familiar faces hanging over him.”

It was familiarity that stayed Tyelkormo from striking her in her proud face, a once love as was shared between all the cousins in the third generation of Finwë’s House and a greater friendship to almost rival that between Findekáno and the one he had saved.

(Shame he had felt upon that news. Relief and shame.)

“You speak of death, but Nelyo lives yet. He will live and he will wake and he will show the lot of you what it is that our family is capable of. Until then, he needs kin by his side to greet him, kin who has not given up on him as all of you have.” 

Was that a flash of pity that crossed the elleth’s face? If so, it only made his anger burn greater.

“Go home, Tyelkormo,” Iríssë said. “There is nothing for you to gain here.”

“There is nothing for you to gain,” he retorted, and if there were tears in his eyes, he hid them well. “You take our place that we built with our hands, claiming reparations for a crossing we did not force you to make, and now you hold my brother captive in the hopes my father will subjugate himself to yours. You seek to cripple him, and all of us, with grief that

“You are delusional,” Iríssë snapped. “My father seeks no such thing.”

“Then why lie about what weakness grips my brother and where it dooms him?” Tyelkormo bit back. “Nelyo is strong, far stronger than any of you. He will survive and you must be blind not to see it!”

“Would you speak so callously against the healers who would only say the same?” came the reply. “His situation is hopeless!”

“Go back to the Helcaraxë if you think there is no hope here.”

Iríssë went to strike him, but he caught her hand. She tugged it free, her own hands drifting to the knives she kept upon her belt in plain view for all to see.

“Does wind pour from your mouth?” Iríssë growled. “I see nothing of substance in your words and no reason not to call the guards down upon you. Perhaps then you will learn some respect for what we have endured and become.”

Tyelkormo barely refrained from sneering, “Except if you were going to call the guards, you would have done so by now. Instead, you continue your argument with me. Perhaps it is your mouth that wind pours from.”

It was miraculous that no one had come running to the sound of heated voices, that both elves had managed to keep their voices low despite the anger that burned within each. It was miraculous that no knives had been drawn, and perhaps at another time in another context they would have been.

Fëanáro’s third son went to step around the incised elleth but was blocked as she stepped in his path. He threw his hands up in response, his insides feeling as though they would burst from emotion. Frustration and anger and grief and what one might mistake as guilt crashed around within him, overwhelming him enough that several tears did slip free, unbidden.

“Why did the eagle have to bring Nelyo here?” he cried.

“If you wanted him in your settlement, you could have saved him yourself and saved Findekáno from the pain of fixing your family’s mistakes!”

“I tried,” he snarled. “We lost many good elves in trying. Or would you make light of their sacrifice and claim their efforts nothing?”

His cousin looked away. The fight seemed to leave her, just a little. “Why are you here?”

“I told you.” He would not abandon Maitimo. Not again. “I am his brother. I am within my right to see him.”

“It has not been permitted, not by my father and not, I’d wager, by yours.”

Tyelkormo looked at her with solemn eyes. “If you were me and Nelyo was Arakáno, what would you do?”

Iríssë sighed. “Wait here,” she said eventually. Then she stepped onto the main path and walked back the way she had come.

Tyelkormo reassured himself that his cousin had not gone to fetch guards as she had threatened earlier, trusting even if it were foolish for him to trust one with such a traitorous father. Yet, he had trusted her before in Valinor upon many a hunt, and later, when the waves had foamed red upon the shore of Alqualondë.

(He had regrets. In his dreams, this was one.)

In his waiting he watched the owl who accompanied him as it preened itself, unruffled by the argument that had occurred before. He spoke to it briefly and it agreed to keep a watch and warn him if any save Iríssë came. The elf fingered his knife. He did not want to use it here (did not want to use it on his uncle’s kin). He was a hunter and his patience was great when needed, but even a hunter could not wait endlessly.

When Iríssë showed her face again, alone, he almost gasped to relieve the tension that had built up within him.

“Follow me,” she said.

Somewhere within himself Tyelkormo dredged up the words needed for thanks. Then he dismissed the owl he had been followed and followed instead his cousin. 

The elves did not speak again until they had reached a shuttered window and Iríssë knocked thrice upon it.

“Mind your tongue,” she commanded him. A vague air then cast itself upon her visage, suggesting that she was engaged in the act of osanwë.

Moments later the shutters drew back as the window opened and Findekáno’s face appeared. His countenance darkened at the sight of his cousin, though he stepped back to let the other elf through. His feet touched the familiar floor. His eyes cast themselves around the familiar room as Findekáno closed the window behind him. Distantly he recognised it as the room Makalaurë had kept. This thought he ignored.

On the large bed was his eldest brother.

( _He had last seen his brother when he rode off to face that fiend and the army he would undoubtedly bring. Copper adorned Maitimo’s head, ash his face, and the blood of their father marked one cheek in three ghastly lines. Astride his horse he had sat, his armour still scuffed and dulled from the fight before._

_Fierce and tearless he had been then, a King cut out amongst the dark and what space between it that was lit by flame. A King he had ridden out with a face rendered impassive by the grief for the father they had been told laid dead in the healer’s tent and a rage that had sent the Balrogs themselves fleeing back to the cesspit from which they had crawled. It was a legend in the making. A song not yet written of a hero who had challenged Evil and won. How many elves had followed him out to that meeting place? Enough that the world seemed to thunder with the sound of marching feet, the silver heads of hundreds of spears glinting like stars before distance swallowed them in full._

_Then the messenger had come. Had said the High King Curufinw_ _ë_ _F_ _ëanáro would live._ _Had claimed a scout returned from the meeting site near death themselves._

_Tyelkormo had set off running. Even then it had been too late.)_

_(He had felt a pull towards that place of slaughter and the dark mountains beyond it. A tugging on his very fëa that begged him to go forth. To his shame, it was not concerned with his wayward brother.)_

Maitimo’s face laid before him, gaunt and ruined. 

The young elf let out a wordless cry and fell to his knees by the bedside. Somewhere above him Findekáno’s gaze softened just a bit.

Tyelkormo’s entire attention was focused upon the elf who slumbered with closed eyes. This was the brother lost to him for too long. The brother caught in torment without rescue. The brother rescued against all odds. The brother who had helped raise him, kissed his scrapped knees and dried his child-tears with a smile as bright as the sun now was. This was the brother he had abandoned and who had paid the dues for the blunders they had made in their quest for freedom and vengeance.

This was the brother he could have saved had he not listened to his father’s words.

Tyelkormo’s hand reached out to touch the gaunt face before him, repulsed by its skeletal look and yet unable to curb the ache in his heart of a little brother who wished his elder would wake up and hold him, whispering in his ear that it all had been a particularly nasty dream. A sob wracked his chest. He did not care. Let those who would judge him for it judge him and be themselves judged lesser for it in the eyes of the world.

Let the world judge those who dismissed his brother’s strength so readily in despair.

(He would be judged in his time, Tyelkormo knew. Perhaps he would be judged less harshly should his eldest brother wake and prove his cowardness mattered not.)

“Nelyo,” he whimpered, an elfling lost in the world who wanted only his older brother’s arms around him. “Nelyo, wake up. Wake up, I am here.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Note: not all owls are strictly nocturnal (I looked it up). This is also the same owl, for those of you who care, that Celegorm sent to check on Maedhros in chapter 4 of OFAF. 
> 
> Name List (Sindarin = Quenya):
> 
> Celegorm = Tyelkormo 
> 
> Fëanor = Fëanáro  
> Maedhros = Maitimo (Nelyo)  
> Maglor = Makalaurë  
> Caranthir = Carnistir  
> Curufin = Curufinwë  
> Amrod = Ambarussa  
> Amras = Ambarussa  
> Celebrimbor = Telperinquar 
> 
> Fingolfin = Ñolofinwë  
> Fingon = Findekáno  
> Aredhel = Iríssë  
> Argon = Arakáno 
> 
> Morgoth = Moringotto
> 
> Helcaraxë  
> Angband = Angamando  
> Aman; Valinor (Blessed Realm)


End file.
